Lucas Carlson's Blog

Life unfolds in unexpected ways. Eliot Peper has been a frequent guest, and at times, even a co-host of the show. We’ve followed his story since his first novel came out.

First Novel Interview – Jun 18, 2014
Second Novel Interview – Dec 3, 2014
Third Novel Interview – Jul 29, 2015

And today, Eliot’s 8th book has been released: Bandwidth

Listening back to those early interviews, it’s really amazing to watch Eliot’s path unfolding. So many times in life, it’s easy to look back with the benefit of hindsight and connect the dots after the fact. But to listen to those interviews captures a journey in a way that’s otherwise impossible to predict.

And where he’s currently ended up is quite impressive. His latest novel reached #3 in the ENTIRE AMAZON KINDLE STORE. Not just the category of science fiction, but the whole store. And now he’s signed a 3 book deal with Amazon to publish his latest trilogy. It’s an incredibly impressive track record Eliot is putting together.

And incredibly difficult to have predicted ahead of time. If people could have predicted, they would have been lining up in 2014 to represent him.

So if you are currently unable to get anyone to notice your great work, take this story as inspiration. Your story hasn’t finished yet. So much lies ahead if you just keep at it.

The post Podcast 38: Eliot Peper on Life’s Unexpected Paths appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

One of my personal mentors has just written a book on entrepreneurship… and it happens to be a damn good one too. Listen to this podcast for just a snippet of his wisdom and buy his new book: The San Francisco Fallacy to learn more from this really amazing man.

The post Podcast 37: Jonathan Siegel on The San Francisco Fallacy appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

This week, Adam Cheyer talks to us about co-founding Siri and the future of AI. Yes, that Siri.

This week, David S. Rose talks to us about his new book: The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business

How do you start a company? Most people think they know, but they get it all wrong. David S Rose has been an entrepreneur and investor for decades. He’s seen it from both sides many times and lives to tell the tale. In his first interview with us, he told us all about his background and how he turned into an investor. This time, he talks about the nitty-gritty of how to start and grow your business.

If you want to see the Gust Startup Checklist, visit gust.com/checklist.

The post Podcast 35: David S. Rose’s 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

What’s the difference between a healthy belief in one’s self and an unhealthy ego that will tear your world apart?

What was it that lead DeLorean to be prosecuted for buying millions of dollars of cocaine?

How can you make sure you don’t find yourself in a mess like that?

Pick up Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Ego Is The Enemy to find out answers to all of these questions and more.

This week, I had an opportunity to talk to Ryan about his experiences writing this book and we talk about some of the great stories and anecdotes that he has included.

The post Podcast 34: Ego Is the Enemy of Entrepreneurship with Ryan Holiday appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

Here’s a quick refresher on my progress with coming up with my next great startup idea:

Startup Journey Log #1: Why I Moved to Paris
Startup Journey Log #2: How To Come Up With Startup Ideas
Startup Journey Log #3: My Terrible Idea
Startup Journey Log #4: Deconstructing A Bad Startup Idea
Startup Journey Log #5: When It’s Time To Pivot

So it’s time to come clean with you. I got a day job.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking I’m a sellout. A poser. A wannabe entrepreneur. A one-hit wonder.

Nah, you’re way too nice to think that. That’s just what I’m thinking of myself. But I think it’s important to share with you some of my feelings because people don’t talk about this stuff very often. And you should also know that I am completely aware that I know my feelings of self-doubt are unjustified.

You see, they would be totally justified if taking a day job meant I was giving up entirely. I am not. My job does not define me. What I do to pay the bills is not who I am. And I completely believe that I’ve got another startup in me. It just didn’t arrive in time before my one year sabbatical in Paris ended.

And that’s okay with me. Inspiration doesn’t work on your schedule. It comes when it’s ready to come.

That’s NOT to say that I have given up trying. Inspiration will never come to me if I’m not looking for it. I keep working. I keep trying. I keep asking questions. I keep learning. I keep writing. I keep trying.

For those of you who have been following along with me over the last year, you might be interested in how I came to this decision. As you know, I had an idea for an investment vehicle which then pivoted into an idea of money management for millennials. I still think both ideas are good ideas. But now I am sure that I’m not the right person to do either one.

I wrote a money management book to test out an MVP of my idea. I sent it out to some trusted friends and readers of this blog. The feedback was universal. There were okay ideas, but nothing to write home about. And these are from my family and friends. I knew I didn’t have a home run. I cut my losses there and decided to move on.

Now I’ve joined a European Enterprise IT Ops company called Automic. They built a mega-cron job scheduling system that works across operating systems. Big companies use it to automate things like customer registration and onboarding. I think I can have a big impact by incorporating concepts like Machine Learning into what they do.

The job will also let me ruminate further on my next startup idea without worrying about paying bills. As Patrick McGinnis suggests, I can invest just 10% of my free time in startups and startup ideas. And I promise I will keep you updated in this journey log as I go along. For now, it’s back to the whiteboard.

 

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Patrick McGinnis has a new book out called The 10% Entrepreneur. It’s a novel idea that has the same roots as Nassim Taleb’s barbell investing approach. Nassim Taleb suggests putting 10% of your assets in high-risk high-reward assets that could multiply enormously and the other 90% of your assets in plain old cash. That way you can never go bankrupt, because only 10% of your assets are exposed.

Similarly, Patrick McGinnis suggests investing 10% of your time in entrepreneurship and 90% of it doing something safe like a day job. Only when your idea proves itself viable do you quit your job and start looking for venture capital, if you even want to go that path.

James Altucher talks about this all the time. He didn’t quit his job until his side project could pay for his lifestyle. This week, we talk to Patrick about this idea and much more.

The post Podcast 33: Entrepreneurship in Just 10% Of Your Time With Patrick McGinnis appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

I haven’t talked about my new startup idea since October and now it’s January. So here’s a quick refresher:

Startup Journey Log #1: Why I Moved to Paris
Startup Journey Log #2: How To Come Up With Startup Ideas
Startup Journey Log #3: My Terrible Idea
Startup Journey Log #4: Deconstructing A Bad Startup Idea

In brief, I quit my job and moved to Paris waiting for the muse to give me an idea.

Then when I got an idea, it turned out that the idea wasn’t such a good one.

Why? In part, because it didn’t fit my background, my reputation, or my expertise.

But was I ready to give up yet?

Hell no.

I knew that there was one thing that would make my lack of experience, reputation or expertise far less relevant: Traction. If I could get traction for my investing advise idea, many sins could be forgiven.

So my next question was: How do I get some traction? I already knew at this point that investing wasn’t a hair-on-fire problem for people I thought were my audience (specifically the average millennial).

I had to choose: Change my target audience or change my startup.

When most entrepreneurs fail to get traction in their startup idea, they don’t change anything about what they are doing until they finally just give up and get a day job. They spend years investing time and money and resources with little to show for it. They get linear progress… a steady rate of new customers, a steady rate of new opportunities. But it never really breaks out into exponential growth.

So which customers would I have to target if I didn’t want to change my startup idea?

Well, my idea is an investment strategy for millennials. But the only millennials who would be interested in a new investment strategy (enough to pay for one at least) would be rich millennials. A much smaller group of people, and one that is harder and more expensive to reach than just an average millennial.

I could either invest a lot of money advertising to a tiny group of people who are hard to reach, or change my approach entirely.

I decided to change my approach.

So the new question was what would millennials have their hair on fire about related to money? If investing isn’t a top 3 money concern for millennials, what is?

I started talking to a bunch of millennials and started to hear some patterns. The most striking thing was how big the money knowledge gap was for millennials. There was a ton of personal finance information out there, but very little of it seemed hyper relevant to millennials. It was mainly written for an older generation.

Certainly the ideas were all out there with books like The Millionaire Next Door, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, The Automatic Millionaire, and others, but none of them have hit a critical mass adoption with the millennial generation. If you took just any random millennial on the street and asked them for the best resource on personal finance they have ever found, you would get a bunch of blank stares. There was no Tim Ferriss of money yet, though Ramit Sethi was the closest of the bunch.

This seemed like a gap to me. Personal finance for millennials seemed like an interesting tangential angle to what I was originally thinking. It had a number of interesting and approachable MVPs and it could even eventually tie in with the original investing idea. After all, a subset of the millennials learning personal finance from me would have enough money to invest. Then the investing idea would become a simple up-sell opportunity on an existing market instead of an expensive and risky ad campaign.

In the next article I will tell you what the MVP for the new pivot will be and we will see if I can start to get some traction on any of this.

The post Startup Journey Log #5: When It’s Time To Pivot appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

Last year people really liked my 34 favorite books of 2014. This year I was again blessed to be able to read a book every single week of the year. Same as last year, not all of them were good (and again I won’t include the bad ones in this list), but many of them were great. If you need to get some holiday book gift shopping done, here are some ideas for you.

THE BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2015
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

I have such mixed feelings about this novel. It is breathtakingly good in so many ways, but has some horribly boring parts where I almost gave up a few times. But yet when I got to the end, I felt like I had lived through the 5,000 years this novel covers myself. Neal Stephenson has created a modern space opera that will surely be a canonical sci-fi moon book going forward. This book is too epic to ever turn into a movie.

RUNNER UP FICTION OF 2015
I, Zombie by Hugh Howey

(NO RELATION to the TV show) This is Hugh Howey’s favorite of the books he has written and I can see why. The concept is this: What if you were a zombie, but completely conscious of all your actions? You couldn’t stop your body from eating brains, but you were definitely in there watching as your body did it. Now tell that story from a first person narrative and include various zombies’ stories and you have I, Zombie. It’s fantastically cathartic and makes you feel grateful for everything you have in life.

THE BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF 2015
The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer

I know that I am going to get criticized for having a “self-help” book top my non-fiction list for 2015, but hear me out. The author created a high-tech startup from nothing, took it public, and sold it for over a billion dollars. And he talks about the whole process throughout the book. So do yourself a favor and pick this one up. I can safely say that this book did change my life.

FICTION
Wired by Douglas E. Richards

What if you could bio-hack genius and immortality into your DNA? Douglas E. Richards did and made this great page-turning novel with the concept. This book has been a top 10 bestselling techno-thriller on Amazon forever, which piqued my interest in it. The twists are fun and surprising and Mr Richards does a great job raising the stakes throughout.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

A classic noir novella. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly suggest it. The dialogue and turns of phrase are masterful and a lot of fun.

Along Came a Spider by James Patterson

James Patterson wrote ten books over twenty years before he wrote this breakout novel. And it’s a nail biter. If you have seen the movie, the book is so much better. The movie is a watered down version of this book.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

What if everyone lived and went to school inside virtual realty like Oculus Rift? And then… what if Mark Zuckerberg gave away his entire fortune AND control of Facebook to someone who could solve a monster puzzle inside of Oculus Rift? Ernest Cline wrote a super fun thriller that incorporated a technology that will likely change the world forever. Read this book for entertainment and a potential peek into the future.

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Recently I had the honor of eating at a restaurant inside of the Eiffel Tower. The restaurant was called Jules Verne. So I wanted to know what this guy was all about. What a fun read! Definitely pick this up if you haven’t read it before.

Uncommon Stock: Exit Strategy (Book 3) by Eliot Peper

My friend Eliot Peper finished his startup thriller trilogy with a bang. This book has more action than the previous two and we get to meet the big bad guy behind it all.

Departure by A.G. Riddle

What if you got in a plane at one point in history and it crashed in a different time in history? This novel feels like reading Lost, except it has a very satisfying ending. It even talks about startup stuff! This was another book that is always in the top 10 techno-thriller list on Amazon.

The Secret History by Donna Tart

This book is a little Crime and Punishment meets Hitchcock’s The Rope. Donna Tart is a master writer who paints large canvases of words one small stroke at a time.

The Martian by Andy Weir

What if you were stranded on Mars with enough supplies to last a month and had to live over a year? Would you make it? This brilliant question brings you The Martian. At first glance it might seem like Gravity 2.0, but it is not at all. And if you liked Gravity, you will love the Martian.

Duck by Stephen Parolini

This little novella is a beautiful little vignette about family.

Lie Down With Lions by Ken Follett

Another pre-Pillars classic Ken Follett war thriller. I don’t love it as much as The Man from St Petersburg, but it is still great and lots of fun.

Midnight by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz’s breakout success keeps you wondering. At first you wonder if it is a werewolf or vampire thriller, but it turns into something totally unexpected and darker. There is a lot of interesting technological and philosophical questions posed in this book, and the ending is masterful. If you love great books with awesome endings, pick this one up.

Shift (Wool: Book 2) by Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey answers your questions about Wool in this second book in the series. How did the silos get there? Who did it? Why? Find out here.

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey writes a space book. Enough said!

Harry Potter: Book 1 by J. K. Rowling

I never did read this book as a kid, but now that my son is five I am reading it to him. What a wonderful story that is so fun for adults and children!

SALES AND MARKETING
Influence by Robert Cialdini

Want to know the tactics and strategies that sales and marketing people employ every day? Also want to know ways to protect yourself from these same tactics? Do you self a favor and read this classic book.

The Boron Letters by Gary Halbert

The secret to writing great sales copy: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. If you want to know what that means, read this classic text on copywriting.

Ask by Ryan Levesque

Did you know you could turn a survey into a sales funnel? This one book opened my eyes to an incredible idea that changed the way I see online sales. If you do any online sales at all and are going to read just one book this year, make it this one.

WRITING
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

What are stories for? Why do they matter? I don’t think anybody has given this question more deep through that Joseph Campbell. And his answers are brilliant and deep. This book is setup as an interview with Campbell which makes it feel less textbooky than his other books.

The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

A brilliant look at how to dissect story structure. If you write (fiction OR non-fiction) and want to know whether what you wrote “works,” use the techniques in this book to help guide you.

Revision and Self-Editing for Publication by James Scott Bell

A great book laying out the process of self-editing.

How to Make a Living as a Writer by James Scott Bell

A motivational book for writers.

Let’s Get Visible by David Gaughran

The big idea of this book: treat Amazon like a search engine. Great idea and most authors I know don’t do it.

Supercharge Your Kindle Sales by Nick Stephenson

Goes great along with Let’s Get Visible with the same idea but applied in a way that Gaugran didn’t write about.

Advanced Twitter Strategies for Authors by Ian H Sutherland

This guy has a way to grow your Twitter audience to tens of thousands of followers. And the method has worked for me! It is a rare book that has such an outlandish claim and actually delivers on it.

5,000 Words Per Hour by Chris Fox

The big ideas of this book: get into flow states, track everything and look into dictation.

Fiction Unboxed by Sean Platt & Johnny B Truant

Find out how these guys pump out tons of great books.

MEDITATION
The Three Pillars of Zen by Phillip Kapleau

Wondering what Zen enlightenment really is all about? This book does the most amazing job of explaining what looks on the surface like an intractable esoteric practice. My favorite part was when they interviewed a bunch of regular people who attained Zen enlightenment about their experience. I have never found another book like this one.

How to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh

There are only a few words per page in Thich Nhat Hanh’s books, but I end up highlighting them all. Very powerful deep inspiration.

How to Sit By Thich Nhat Hanh

This is Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple book about meditation.

How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

A beautiful book about the secrets of relationships.

MONEY
What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars by Jim Paul

This guy got everything he wanted in life. And then lost it all. His recounting of the story is riveting and the lessons he gained from the process and incredibly important.

Angel Investing by David S. Rose

This is one of the most thorough and cogent books on the guts of angel investing available today.

Startup Wealth by Josh Maher

A fantastic companion to David S. Rose’s book, Josh tells stories directly from many of the top angel investors in the world about how and why they invest. Very fascinating book!

The Little Book of Trading by Michael W. Covel

If you are curious about trading, this book provides a very simple starting point without getting bogged down in too much detail.

The Demographic Cliff by Harry S. Dent

What happens when the baby boomers get older? They spend progressively less money year over year. Given that consumer spending makes up 70% of GDP, this is naturally going to lead to a major economic slowdown soon that will last years.

The post My 39 Best Books of 2015 appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

Last week, I told you about the new startup idea I had. It was a robot investor app. It would automatically invest in stocks for you based on some trading ideas I discovered.

On the surface it sounds like a great big idea. Something that venture capitalists typically love to invest in. After all, there are two big startups right now that do something like. And both have raised over hundred million dollars from VCs. But when I talked to some investors I knew, they were not impressed.

Before I tell you why, I want to point out something important that might not be obvious. I have raised $10M before from VCs and then sold that business makes me a known quantity. That means that investors will take phone calls from me just to hear what I am up to.

I’m not telling you this to brag. Just because they will take my calls doesn’t mean they will end up giving me money. I know many serial founders that have had trouble raising money on their second or third startups. I just want you to understand something that few first-time entrepreneurs understand.

If you read news headlines about how someone just raised million on just an idea. This is how they did it. Those founders are known quantities. Their company might have just started. But their investor had known the entrepreneur for a while. The entrepreneur knew that the investor had interest before he even started the business.

I can’t take advantage of my position and call them every week with a new idea. So when I called my investors, it wasn’t just any idea that I wanted to pitch them. This was something that I thought was special. I wanted to see if they thought so too.

Their reaction against the idea boiled down to the fact that I had no experience in this field. They had no way to judge whether I had stumbled upon something big that people would want. In the cloud space they know that my opinion makes a difference. In the finance space, there’s no way to tell.

TAKE AWAY #1

Your background and reputation mean more to investors than you might realize. It makes a big difference. Why you started the company matters. Whether you are uniquely suited to building it can make or break whether a startup is investable.

TAKE AWAY #2

I didn’t start programming or building my idea yet. Before I even spent a single line of code prototyping, I wanted to make sure that there were legs behind it.

And so far my idea had no legs.

So I called up one of my personal advisors. He pointed out something so obvious that I couldn’t believe I had missed it myself. He said my instincts were good to check with investors first. But I hadn’t yet verified that people actually wanted this. That people had their hair-on-fire.

Even veteran entrepreneurs forget to do this step. You can get so caught up in your own excitement that you forget to verify that there is an audience for it. So that was the next thing that I had to do, verify this was a hair-on-fire problem for a lot of people.

I spent some time thinking about how to go about doing this. It’s like building a minimal viable product. And in this case, the MVP was not a mobile application. It was with a simple email newsletter.

I paired down my grandiose ideas of raising millions of dollars right off the bat. I decided to figure out if I could build a small audience on a much smaller value proposition. One that would take much less time investment for me to validate.

And if I couldn’t validate it, what then? How could I expect people to invest money with me if I couldn’t even get them to sign up for a newsletter?

I know this sounds ridiculous when you are reading it right now. How stupid Lucas is that he wanted to jump the gun. Remember, I have been making these same mistakes for 10 years now. I should know better by now. But these are the same kind of mistakes that first time entrepreneurs make all the time.

That’s why I wrote a book about it. They think that the key to the next step in their success is just a hire a programmer to build their application. Or to find investors so that they can build a team. First time entrepreneurs make the mistakes that I’m making right now.

So I thought about what would it take to start a simple email newsletter. One that shares the same ideas behind my investment thesis. This made me ask the most important question that a founder can ever ask.

Who exactly is my target audience and what is their hair-on-fire problem?

At first I thought the audience for this start up idea where millennials. People generally between the ages of 20 to 40 years old. People who didn’t trust Wall Street and were just coming into their own money. Whose careers are finally starting to take off. For the first time in their lives they were not living paycheck to paycheck anymore. These people needed to understand how to invest their money.

My reasoning was that Buy-and-Hold investing it’s dynamic enough. It does not hold their interest, and there weren’t any good alternatives to it. Day trading took up too much time and often lost too much money. Everything else was a scam.

So I took out some Facebook and Twitter ads. I threw together a short explainer video. I created a mailing list in MailChimp, and put a few dozen dollars to work.

The results were pitiful.

That shouldn’t be a surprise to my most keen readers. But let me explain to you what went wrong if you don’t already understand.

TAKE AWAY #3

Investing money wasn’t a hair-on-fire problem for millennials. Most of my audience didn’t know the first thing about investing. They didn’t have a brokerage account. They didn’t even know how much money they should invest if they could.

It’s a simple as that. I made a mistake. I came up with what I thought was a great idea. One that every millennial out there could take advantage of. But in reality, only a tiny subset of millennials would be interested in it. And even for them, it is questionable whether their hair was on fire about it.

But I made this mistake before I invested a lot of time or money building it. Before I started thinking about how the product would work or hiring programmers. So even though I am still making many rookie mistakes, at least I am not making that one.

At this point in my journey, I had 3 options. I could give up and try another idea. I could re-target my audience, advertising just the wealthiest millennials (which could be expensive). Or I could figure out a related hair-on-fire problem for the broader millennial audience.

Next week I will tell you which of these three options I picked and how I moved forward. In the meantime feel free to leave your guess in the comments. (Hint: it’s a trick question)

The post Startup Journey Log #4: Deconstructing A Bad Startup Idea appeared first on Craftsman Founder.